Thought Shrapnel

Recently, when I met up with someone who was launching a new council website, they casually mentioned that his team had optimised it for a reading age of nine. This, apparently, is the average reading age of the UK adult population. A few years ago, my brother-in-law, who works for a church, showed me the way that they had started providing church updates in video format. YouTube and TikTok are by far the most-used apps by (western) teenagers.

Are we heading towards a post-literate society? This article by Sarah O’Connor quotes Neil Postman but I think it would be more appropriate to cite Walter Ong on secondary orality, a kind of orality that depends on literate culture and the existence of writing. For example, the updates provided by my brother-in-law’s church depend on there being a script, written updates to share with the congregation, and a programme of events to which they can refer.

Technological shifts reshape how we perceive and process information, and — as I mentioned in a recent post — we live in a world which privileges immediate, emotionally-charged, image-driven communication over slower, deliberate reflections. It’s a difficult thing to resist or change, because like fast-food it’s something which appeals to something innate.

(In passing, I would point out that the literacy proficiency of 16-24 year olds in England is probably due to the introduction of a phonics-based approach in early years, and ensuring young people remain in education or training up to the age of 18)

The implications for politics and the quality of public debate are already evident. These, too, were foreseen. In 2007, writer Caleb Crain wrote an article called Twilight of the Books in the New Yorker magazine about what a possible post-literate culture might look like. In oral cultures, he wrote, cliche and stereotype are valued, conflict and name-calling are prized because they are memorable, and speakers tend not to correct themselves because “it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for”. Does that sound familiar?

[…]

These trends are not unavoidable or irreversible. Finland demonstrates the potential for high-quality education and strong social norms to sustain a highly literate population, even in a world where TikTok exists. England shows the difference that improved schooling can make: there, the literacy proficiency of 16-24 year olds was significantly better than a decade ago.

The question of whether AI could alleviate or exacerbate the problem is more tricky. Systems like ChatGPT can perform well on many reading and writing tasks: they can parse reams of information and reduce it to summaries.

[…]

But, as [David] Autor [an economics professor at MIT] says, in order to make good use of a tool to “level up” your skills, you need a decent foundation to begin with. Absent that, [Andreas] Schleicher [director for education and skills at the OECD] worries that people with poor literacy skills will become “naive consumers of prefabricated content”.

Source: The Financial Times

Image: Rachit Tank